Governments and other regulatory entities instill broad and strict requirements and guidelines on products to ensure quality. Healthcare software is not exempt from these requirements and guidelines. The concepts that must be validated vary and may include human factors and abilities. For example, one concept is color contrast. Color contrast itself helps ensure items found on a user interface are visible, distinguishable, and understood by all users, including those utilizing assistive visual technologies (e.g. magnification) or those that are colorblind.
Current tools that assist in validating color contrast rely on contrast ratio calculation. However, the contrast ratio calculation used by these tools is only one part of accessibility for iconography. Additionally, current tools provide pre-determined color ratio thresholds which do not take into consideration changing requirements (based on country, application type, etc.). Furthermore, in the case of icons, complexity (e.g. gradients of color) can make checking all the various colors on the border of the icon challenging and time consuming. For example, for a typical healthcare software application having approximately five thousand five hundred icons, it would take approximately ten minutes to check accessibility for each icon, or more than five months for a single employee assigned to the task.